What is the nastiest way somebody was fired from their band?
ADAM FLOYD replies
Don Felder was fired from the Eagles in a very nasty vindictive way as he was close to exposing the other members’ scam. The band’s affairs were managed through Eagles Inc, a company owned by the three remaining early members (Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey) in a supposedly equal three-way split, but it came to Felder’s attention in the 1990s that the other two had been taking advantage of him and not paying him a fair share of the band’s income.
As a director, he had a legal right to examine the company’s accounts and refused to sign the contract for the band’s upcoming tour until he had done so. Letting Felder see the accounts would have exposed the fraud but they couldn’t go on tour unless he signed, so the response by Henley, Frey and manager Irving Azoff was to immediately terminate Felder’s employment in the band without warning, allowing them to tour without him. Making matters worse, Azoff was not only the band’s manager but also Felder’s personal manager, so he didn’t even have a manager to fight the band and a vicious lawsuit resulted in which Felder’s lawyer successfully demanded a full audit of the band’s accounts from the day he joined and payment of everything he was owed.
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JON M writes:
There’s been a few nasty ones. One of note was the depature of Status Quo bassist Alan Lancaster from the band. 1985 Quo opened Live Aid after their set Lancaster was chatting to Francis Rossi and the subject of a new album came up. Lancaster said he has some songs on the go, Rossi said the same and that he would ‘be in touch’. Lancaster flew back to Australia (he had been living there for a couple of years) and waited.
A year later he started to read about a new Quo album that was coming out (In The Army Now) with Rhino Edwards on bass (ex-Climax Blues Band). Basically he had been sacked and nobody bothered to tell him!
There followed a lot of bad blood, court cases and slaggings off, and it took 30 years before hatchets were buried and appologies given and accepted.
Ok Mr Lancaster hadn’t been 100% happy with the direction Rossi and Parfetr were taking the band, but it was still an under handed way of getting rid of him
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